And not very sensible either. Wise words from the Kaiser Chiefs in the light of Saturday’s Dublin riots. 9.5 Saturdays out of 10, I head into Dublin city centre but not last weekend. I deliberately stayed out of town to avoid any trouble that I feared the Love Belfast parade could cause.

Chicken Licken that I am, even I did not anticipate the scale of the random acts of violence committed by these yobs and scumbags. However, unlike Michael McDowell and the Gardaí, neither I nor anyone I spoke with leading up to the march were expecting the parade to be entirely peaceful. Not many seemed overly enamoured with the idea of Union Jacks and marching bands of Unionists passing by the GPO either.

While the parade may have been sensitive and provocative, for once it was not politics or religion that caused the problem. Hooligans looking for any excuse to cause havoc hijacked the day with shocking consequences. It was certainly not a day that I felt proud to be Irish. Sadly, we have had warning signs from this minority in recent years, notably on St Patrick’s Day. Hopefully, this trend will not continue.

Yet every cloud has to have a silver lining, and Irish blogs came into their own in reporting the events as they unfolded. I found Indymedia and The Dossing Times particularly good, and the ever eagle-eyed Red Mum reports that Love Ulster was the top tag on Flickr.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 27th, 2006 at 10:14 pm and is filed under irish. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.